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Marijuana - The Home Stretch

I am convinced we will finally see legalization in the near future. Canada has legalized. Mexico plans to. 65% support recreational marijuana and 97% medicinal marijuana. It is quickly becoming a burden for politicians to be against. In this thread I am going to document the final push to federal legalization and provide evidence of the government conspiracy against marijuana. I have been researching this issue for a long time and I want to put some of it in a place that is easier for me to reference and find. I believe the day will come when I will post the announcement for federal legalization in this thread, and by that time I hope to have a fairly comprehensive historical guide of how we went from full legalization to full prohibition and back. Some of this stuff is going to be dry like Senate transcripts and Supreme Court Audio but I can only prove so much with youtube videos and summaries of events.

Here is a Harvard paper on the history of Marijuana prohibition. Good read but I will post some quotes/excerpts of the important parts.

In his campaign against marijuana in the years prior
to the passage of the act, Harry Anslinger (Commissioner of Narcotics at the time) made many
claims that marijuana caused violent and aggressive behavior as well as mental deterioration.
Moreover, during the hearings in which the Marihuana Tax Act was examined by the House Ways
and Means Committee, much of the evidence presented to argue in favor of the Act’s passage
took the form of newspaper articles noting the prevalence of marijuana addiction and linking
it causally to criminal behavior.

Commissioner of Narcotics Harry Anslinger engaged in a propoganda/fake news campaign to create a public hysteria to justify prohibition of marijuana. Anslinger wrote a bunch of Op-eds in newspapers and then used those as evidence in these hearings.

He continually disseminated horror stories about people
who committed violent murders, allegedly because they had used marijuana, to the press. His
campaign was even responsible for the famous anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness,
which was actually regarded as a genuine attempt to address a serious social issue at the time.
Anslinger’s anti-marijuana campaign was a far-reaching campaign that influenced virtually all
of the information the public received about marijuana during the 1930’s and 1940’s. Virtually
all of the magazine articles in the mid-1930’s that called attention to the ‘‘marijuana problem’’
received the information on which they based their contentions from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Obviously, such a far-reaching campaign was bound to affect the way that governmental officials
addressed the issue of marijuana, and the hysteria generated by Anslinger’s campaign led to
the incorrect classification of marijuana as a narcotic. This mis-classification led policymakers
to model the first twentieth-century marijuana legislation after other pieces of narcotics
legislation rather than after post-prohibition-alcohol or tobacco legislation.
Anslinger’s campaign eventually led to the promulgation of the Marihuana Tax Act, America’s
first anti-marijuana legislation, in 1937

Anslinger didnt just write op-eds he fed stories to the press who would report on violence Anslinger said was caused by marijuana. Literally all evidence introduced was fake news fed by Anslinger. This Act says tax but it was in effect a ban because they intentionally made it nearly impossible to jump through all the hoops and hurdles to use it legally. I will get to that in a second.

The legislation made marijuana for any purpose other than medical use prohibitively expensive. Moreover, it
made even medical use virtually impossible because of extensive paperwork requirements placed on doctors
attempting to use it. The Act also contained a tax stamp requirement for all sales of hemp
products, which the federal government almost invariably refused to issue. The combination
of financial and bureaucratic obstacles effectively eliminated legal dealings in hemp products,
regardless of purpose.

The influence of Anslinger’s anti-marijuana campaign over policymakers’ propagation of the
Marihuana Tax Act is evident in both the information that they used to justify the need for
the Act and the reactions of policymakers when medical experts criticized the evidentiary basis
for their claims that the Act was necessary. During the 1937 hearings in which the House Ways
and Means Committee examined the Marihuana Tax Act, W.C. Woodward, a representative of the
American Medical Association who supported Congress’s aims but lobbied for less restrictive
legislation to protect marijuana’s medical potential pointed out that Congress had virtually
no empirical medical proof that marijuana was addictive, prominently used by adolescents, or
causally connected to violent behavior. He pointed out that all the evidence on which they
based the need for this legislation came in the form of newspaper articles, and not from medical
sources.

The represenative of the AMA at the hearing who supported the cause but wanted far less restrictions to protect medical marijuana points out that no one has produced any real proof of the claims made and that they are just reading newspaper articles. Lets see how that worked out for him.

Due to the politically charged nature of this issue that resulted from Anslinger’s campaign,
however, Woodward’s criticisms of the quality of legislators’ evidence base only served to
turn legislators against him. They questioned him critically about everything from his educational
background to his relationship to the American medical Association, never seriously considering
the merits of his objections to their evidence base, until they finally cut him out of the
discussion once and for all, admonishing him for throwing ‘‘obstacles in the way of something
that the Federal Government is trying to do.’’ Thus, despite the lack of any evidence of
the significant societal harms of marijuana other than various news articles, most of which
were fed to the press by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Marihuana Tax Act was signed
on August 2, 1937, effectively eliminating the legal use of marijuana for any purpose.

This is peak government right here. How dare the doctor representing the leading medical association in America question us. We are the government, we do what we want. Then they threw him out on his ass.

Up until the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act, Anslinger’s anti-marihuana campaign appeared
to be aimed at eliminating only the recreational use of marijuana. In fact, during the legislative
hearings for the Marihuana Tax Act, C. Hester (Asst. General Counsel for the Treasury Department
and a witness in the hearings) actually testified that one of the purposes for which the marijuana
tax money would be used was to facilitate the medical use of marijuana. However, Anslinger’s
anti-marijuana campaign eventually began to focus on eliminating the use of marijuana in the
medical realm as well. The Bureau began making it increasingly difficult to obtain marijuana
for scientific studies, and when studies were possible, the Bureau would only accept as legitimate
those studies that painted a negative picture of marijuana. Marijuana was removed from the
Pharmacopoeia in 1942.

The original intent still considered Marijuana to be a medicine that should be used for medicinal purposes. Soon after passage they then went after medical marijuana too. Anslinger rigged the studies by only allowing a few to happen and then would only accept negative conclusions as legitimate. He could have 10 studies done and 3 say negative things and 7 not negative studies he would just point to the 3 negative studies. In his position he was not only in control of who got to do the studies but which studies ever saw the light of day.

Finally, Anslinger turned his attention to aligning the dominant
medical opinions with the Bureau’s anti-marijuana platform.Shortly after the passage of the Marihuana Tax Act, New York’s Mayor La Guardia formed a large
team of M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s to study the sociological, medical, and psychological consequences
of marijuana use in New York City. The report, published in 1944, concluded that there was
no proof that marijuana caused violent, aggressive behavior. Even before the report was
published in 1944, Anslinger undermined and suppressed it. In 1942 when the Journal of the
American Medical Association published an editorial that validated the La Guardia study as
‘‘a careful study’’, and actually mentioned a few of marijuana’s potential medical uses, Anslinger
quickly responded, writing a letter to the AMA Journal severely criticizing the La Guardia
study.

New York Mayor La Guardia commissioned a study and it said there was no proof of the negative consequences that were being accused. Anslinger undermined and suppressed the report. The AMA supported the report so Anslinger went after them. Lets see how that goes....

Mysteriously, at that point, the American Medical Association ‘‘made an extraordinary about-face
and joined the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the denunciation of the La Guardia Report.’’
The Journal then published an editorial that advised policymakers to disregard such an ‘‘unscientific’’
study and to ‘‘continue to regard marihuana as a menace wherever it is purveyed.’’ Although
it has stopped publishing evidentiarily weak papers lamenting the dangers of marijuana use,
the Journal remained consistently weary of indicating opinions that would inject it in any
significant way into the politics associated with the marijuana issue from that point, and
for years afterward. Anslinger had, with the final suppression of all opposing medical evidence,
ushered in an era of anti-marijuana sentiment that would dominate America’s overall opinion
regarding marijuana, regardless of the purpose of its use, from 1944 until the 1960’s

The AMA falls in line and avoids the subject for a long time. Marijuana is the debil is now the only acceptable opinion allowed.

Even if Anslinger exaggerated
the public’s concern with the phenomenon of Mexican marijuana-smokers or the public’s belief
that marijuana use presented a significant social problem, racist and classist images associated
with marijuana still almost certainly powered the movement toward anti-marijuana legislation.
Anslinger himself believed that Mexicans were responsible for the marijuana problem,1 and
he unabashedly played on and evoked the anti-Mexican and anti-African-American sentiment that
did exist in order to further his public anti-marijuana propaganda campaign. He disseminated
stories through the Bureau of Narcotics about ‘‘colored’’ college students smoking marijuana
with white female students and getting them pregnant, or about ‘‘Negroes’’ high on marijuana
kidnapping young girls and infecting them with STD’s, in order to garner public support for
anti-marijuana legislation.

Anslinger used racist messages like marijuana causes white women to have sex with black men and that black men will get high and kidnap white girls and give them STDs to get public support.

The contention over the marijuana issue became even more starkly evident roughly a year later
when President Nixon, looking once and for all to establish conclusive evidence of marijuana’s
dangers to justify its severe restriction, established the National Commission on Marijuana
and Drug Abuse to look into the marijuana problem. To Nixon’s dismay, the commission found
that the original laws that outlawed were based on misguided and incorrect speculation regardingmarijuana’s effects and social impact, and recommended that the law be changed to decriminalize
the possession of marijuana when for personal use. In what has become the all-too-typical
response of policymakers when confronted with an argument that questions the accuracy of the
Anslinger vision of marijuana’s dangers, Nixon responded by divorcing himself from his own
commission before the recommendations were even published and proclaiming that he would simply
refuse to follow any recommendation that involved the legalization of marijuana. Turning
a blind eye yet again to any evidence that contradicted Anslinger’s anti-marijuana platform
or the accuracy of the ‘‘killer weed’’ image, policymakers dismissed the Commission’s recommendations,
and the politically-based prohibitions continued.

The Marijuana tax act was ruled unconstitutional in 1969 and subsequently the Controlled Substances Act was passed. Marijuana was placed as schedule 1 which is the strictest category and Nixon commissioned a study to back that up. That commission however recommended decriminilization so Nixon told them to **** off and did what he wanted anyways. Do you notice a trend here? The studies on Marijuana were done and they support legalization. Just because the government at the time told them to **** off doesnt mean we need new studies to disprove what was never proven in the first place.

Going to continue from the Harvard paper but in a new post as I get to the Controlled Substances Act.

The government’s battle against pro-medical-marijuana groups to keep marijuana classified as
a Schedule I substance began when NORML filed its first rescheduling petition with the Bureau
of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD, and the future DEA). Congress granted the right of
schedule challenges to interested parties who wished to do so and secured for those parties
the right to a hearing on their challenges as part of the Controlled Substances Act in 1970.
It did so in order to allow for the reclassification of substances in the event that continued
research of a their properties led to the discovery of new medical benefits or other properties
that rendered it’s classification incorrect or obsolete. Just two years after the passage
of the Controlled Substances Act, NORML put this rescheduling clause to the test by filing
the first rescheduling petition in 1972. The BNDD reacted to this petition swiftly and negatively.
Without even holding the hearings called for in the Controlled Substances Act, the Bureau refused
to even file the petition, claiming that the requirements of a treaty signed at a 1961 international
anti-drug convention did not permit them to file such a petition. NORML appealed this summary
dismissal to the D.C. Circuit, and the court found in NORML’s favor. The court ruled that
such a dismissal without any merit-based findings contradicted the administrative process, which called for findings on the merits.

The CSA allows for petitions to reschedule specific drugs. NORML took them up on this in 1972. The DEA told them to **** off. NORML pointed out that they were atleast supposed to have a hearing according to the process set out in the CSA. NORML sued and a judge ordered the DEA to follow the process and allow hearings. If you think this has a happy ending you havent been paying attention.

On remand in 1975, the Administrative Law Judge assigned to the case found that the 1961 treaty
did not prevent the rescheduling of marijuana as asserted by the BNDD, and proposed that the
proper response to the petition for the BNDD would be to hold the rescheduling hearings on
the issue that the Controlled Substances Act called for. As if neither the Court of Appeals
nor the Administrative Law Judge had said a word about the necessity of holding the hearings
on the rescheduling matter, however, the Acting Administrator of the BNDD (now renamed the
DEA) issued a final order that denied the petition without any hearings on the matter.
The petitioners again appealed the summary petition dismissal to the D.C. Circuit, and again
the Court of Appeals ordered the DEA to comply with the rule-making procedures of the Controlled
Substances Act, and hold hearings. This time, the court also ordered the DEA to submit the
petition to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

The DEA again denied the petition without any hearings in defiance of the judge so NORML sues again in the Court of Appeals and the DEA was again ordered to follow the rules and was also ordered to submit the petition to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This is all happening over years and the DEA is simply stalling while throwing every bureaucratic hurdle imaginable at NORML.

The DEA did comply with the
order to refer the petition to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. However,
when they issued a recommendation in 1979 that marijuana remain on Schedule I, the DEA summarily
denied the rescheduling petition without holding the required hearings yet again.152
For a third time, the petitioners appealed the DEA’s summary denial to the D.C. Circuit. Again,
the court remanded the case and instructed the DEA to submit the case to the Department of
Health and Human Services (formerly the Department of Health, Education and Welfare) for scientificevaluation, and to hold the required hearings on the matter.

The DEA submitted the petition to the Dept HEW and they recommended status quo with no hearings or scientific studies. The DEA denied the petition again and NORML sued and won yet again. This time the Dept HEW was ordered to actually conduct scientific research and to hold hearings. At this point its 7 years since the original lawsuit. Finally a hearing is about to happen, but its only going to reveal how much of a sham this whole process was.

Finally, in 1986, the DEA complied
and announced that hearings on the rescheduling of marijuana would be held before Administrative
Law Judge Francis Young. The hearings commenced in the summer of 1986, and continued for
two years. Finally, in 1988, Judge Young issued a ruling rejecting the standards the DEA
used to determine that marijuana did not have an accepted medical use. He determined that
marijuana should be deemed to have an accepted medical use (and should, therefore, be moved
to Schedule II) as long as a respectable minority in the medical community supported its use
in medical treatments.

We get 2 years of hearings starting in 1986, 14 years after the original petition. The judge actually sides against the DEA and ruled that marijuana clearly has medicinal value so it could be not be a schedule 1 drug. Ballgame over right? Surely they ran out of shenanigans......

True to its unrelenting anti-marijuana stance, the DEA disregarded
the recommendations of its own judge, and denied the petition using the same eight-factor ‘‘accepted
medical use’’ test that Judge Young rejected to determine that marijuana did not have an accepted
medical use. Interestingly, several of these factors were impossible to satisfy for any
drug with a Schedule I classification. The requirement that a drug have general use and acceptance
before being removed from Schedule I, for example, would be impossible to meet because the
government’s restrictions on Schedule I substances would prevent any general use or acceptance.
Thus, the petitioners appealed a fourth time in 1991.

The DEA disregarded the ruling by their own judge at their own hearing. The DEA listed 8 criteria marijuana must meet of which some were impossible under the status quo because how can marijuana have a general accepted use if the people who use it are getting arrested and incarcerated. So now we get more appeals.

This time, the petition was ordered
returned to the DEA for reconsideration of the factors used to determine medical acceptability.
The DEA responded in 1992 by reworking the medical acceptability test, removing the ‘‘impossiblefactors’’, disavowing any use of the ‘‘impossible factors’’ in their previous rejection of
the rescheduling petition, and denying the petition again The petitioners appealed a fifth
time, this time alleging DEA bias in the decision-making process and objecting to allegedly
variant evidentiary standards utilized by the DEA in their decision-making processes. This
time, however, the court denied their appeal, finding no prejudicial influence in the evidentiary
standard, and the DEA issued a final denial of the marijuana rescheduling petition in 1994.
Thus, 22 years, five appeals, and two adverse Administrative Law Judge opinions later, the
BNDD/DEA had achieved final and total official legal validation of their contention that marijuana
does not have medical utility under federal law despite significant evidence from the 1988
hearings that it does.

Eventually the DEA gets a favorable ruling after 22 years successfully killing the lawsuits with bureaucracy. However, while the DEA defended marijuana having no medicinal value it had a medical marijuana program as I am about to get to.

The question of whether the primary motivations for the continued governmental resistance to
legalization of medicinal marijuana since 1970 are based in political considerations or medical
considerations is answered in large part by the government’s quiet recognition of marijuana’smedical potential through the ‘‘Compassionate IND’’ program during its legal battle with NORML.
Even as the FBN/DEA was using every procedural means necessary to avoid even considering marijuana’s
medical utility in 1976, Congress created the ‘‘Compassionate IND’’ program, which allowed
people in need of medical marijuana to obtain government-grown marijuana for therapeutic use.

The history of this program, and of the circumstances behind its eventual termination in 1992166
illustrate yet again the extent to which the federal drug enforcement agencies’ collective
inability to separate medical marijuana use from recreational marijuana use continues to drive
the government’s public denial of marijuana’s medical potential even as it quietly recognizes
that potential out of the public eye. From 1976 to 1988, the government quietly provided a
small number of medical patients with government-grown marijuana for therapeutic use even as
it vigorously denied marijuana’s medical utility in its rescheduling legal battles. The
government left this program alone until events from 1989 to 1991 threatened to expand both
the number of patients in the program and the publicity surrounding the program. At that time,
the Bush administration ordered the FDA to shut down the program, not because marijuana’s medical
utility had suddenly come into question, but because the Bush administration felt that the
program may send a ‘‘bad message’’ about marijuana use that could undermine its overall anti-drug
stance.

The medical marijuana program was fine as long as it was a dozen people or so getting it. Once it gained public attention Papa Bush killed the program to be "tough on drugs". Rot in hell asshole. Hypocrisy by the federal government is again off the charts.

With the FDA relegated to an consultative role in determining
marijuana’s medical utility as long as marijuana remains a Schedule-I drug, the DEA possesses
almost total discretion not only in the determination of marijuana’s medical utility but also
in the decision as to whether or not to even allow marijuana’s medical potential to be studied.
The DEA has used this discretion to prevent the study of marijuana’s medical potential with
a circular line of reasoning that justifies marijuana’s Schedule-I status by pointing to the
lack of scientific studies demonstrating its safety and medical efficacy but impedes all efforts
to study marijuana’s safety or medical efficacy citing marijuana’s Schedule-I status

Here is another Harvard paper focusing on effects the anti-drug Act of 1986 and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 had on the rates of blacks attending college. I will just quote the conclusion.

We would expect states that adopted TIS sentencing to have increases in
the state prison population because the law led to longer sentences and an
increased likelihood of prison as opposed to another form of punishment for all
crimes (Shepherd, 2002; Stemen et al., 2005). Both the DD analysis using adjacent
states and the DDD analysis provide some evidence that having a state
implement TIS and receive federal funding leads to a decreased likelihood of
college enrollment for Black males. The point estimate for the decrease in the
likelihood of college enrollment from both of these analyses are close and
demonstrate an approximately 30% decrease in the probability of enrollment for Black males after a state adopts Truth–in–Sentencing laws. Given that 20% of the
increase in state incarceration can be attributed to the increase in imprisonment
for drug infractions, and the increase in incarceration was concentrated among
young men and particularly young Black men aged 18-24, these laws likely had a
deleterious effect on the ability of young men to enroll in college. As previously
mentioned, Western et al (2010), show that some of the rise in incarceration over
the time period from 1980 to 2010, came from drug crimes, although TIS laws
purportedly targeted violent crime. The Black young men in the age group most
likely to attend college were also most likely to be arrested and imprisoned
(Carson, 2015). Being imprisoned and having a greater likelihood of being
sentenced to prison for young Black males decreased the likelihood of college
attendance in light of the difficulties in accessing secondary education to
complete high school degrees while incarcerated and an inability to receive
federal financial aid to pursue postsecondary studies while incarcerated (FAFSA,
2017; Kirk & Sampson, 2013; US Congress, 1994). Further, many colleges and
potential employers asked questions about felonies and incarceration that
decreased the likelihood of acceptance for persons formerly incarcerated
(Bernberg & Krohn, 2003).
Prior research and statistics clearly demonstrate that Black men have been
disproportionately arrested, convicted, and served longer sentences for the same
crimes when compared to their White peers (Mustard, 2001; Tonry, 1994; US
Sentencing Commission, 2001; US Sentencing Commission, 2001). This increasing incarceration has had many effects on the lives of Black men (Western, 2006).
However, to date, less evidence has existed on the effects of this incarceration on
Black male college enrollment (DiPrete & Buchmann, 2006; Kirk & Sampson,
2013). This paper provides evidence that the Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994 led to a decrease in the likelihood of college enrollment
using variation in timing and adoption of state Truth–in–Sentencing Laws. Given
that these results suggest that Black males have decreased access to higher
education, at a time when the difference between earnings between a high school
graduate and a college graduate are increasing, this study has implications for
policy makers looking to increase access to and retention in higher education.

Here is the NHTSA's report to Congress on driving impairment from marijuana. I will point out some highlights.

- Marijuana causes variability of lane position while driving but does not caused increased lane departures. Alcohol does increase lane departures and using both has an additive effect to increased lane departures.

- Marijuana causes decreased mean speeds, increased time driving under the speed limit, increased following distance of the vehicle in front of them, and less risk taking. Alcohol on the other hand causes increased mean speeds, increased time driving over the speed limit, more risk taking, and a greater variability of speed.

- The report suggests that drivers using marijuana compensate for the impairments by being safer overall drivers because they are aware they are impaired. Whereas drunk people generally dont attempt to compensate for being impaired.

Canopy, the world largest legal marijuana company puts a 300 million dollar deposit on buying Americas largest legal marijuana company(Acreage). The deposit is a downpaynent on a 3.4 billion payment that comes due when Marijuana is legalized federally in the US. The end is near!

Medical marijuana passes the Alabama Senate and is expected to pass the House shortly. Jeff Sessions must be spinning in his grave. And by the way, yes, the Republican sponsor of the Bill is in a Doctor. When Alabama can recognize medical marijuana I think its time for the federal government to give up this charade.

Medical marijuana passes the Alabama Senate and is expected to pass the House shortly. Jeff Sessions must be spinning in his grave. And by the way, yes, the Republican sponsor of the Bill is in a Doctor. When Alabama can recognize medical marijuana I think its time for the federal government to give up this charade.

It’s about time! I’m glad they are making progress but marijuana should have been legalized like 10-15 years ago, it’s time for the government to stop cutting its nose off to spite its face.

It’s about time! I’m glad they are making progress but marijuana should have been legalized like 10-15 years ago, it’s time for the government to stop cutting its nose off to spite its face.

Look at what I posted and you will know why it's illegal and why it has stayed illegal.

If anyone finds themself charges with possession of marijuana let me know. I can help. Medical marijuana has been proven in federal court several times. All you need to do is cite those cases and motion to dismiss the charges because charging you with possession of a schedule 1 drug because marijuana is misclassified. I do not suggest trying this without a lawyer.

The relevant case laws are

Robert C Randall vs US 1976

State of Washington vs Diana 1979

State of Florida v Musikka 1989

US v Burton 1990

State of Florida v Kenneth and Barbara Jenks 1991

State of Idaho v Hastings 1990

Introduce the case rulings into evidence. Have the police officer who arrested you read the relevant parts while on the stand. Then ask him a few leading questions where he will have to admit to medical marijuana having medicinal purposes and thus is not a schedule 1 drug or commit perjury. You might have to go to an appeals court because lower court judges are ass clowns and are never held responsible for deliberately misinterpering the law but a jury trial you will win every time or at worst get a hung jury.